D.G.

Thoughts

Finally got around to migrating the blog from Jekyll/Octopress to Hugo. I managed to preserve the RSS feed URL, so it was a fairly smooth migration aside from a blip when feed readers thought all the posts were new again it. I’ve still got some work tweaking the theme and category/tag pages, but seems to be working out pretty well.

A few years ago, I’d migrated from Wordpress to a static site generator for my blog as part of migrating off a shared web host to a VPS. I’d started with Octopress since it had been getting a fair bit of buzz at the time. I was pretty happy with the rendered output, but the underlying software had its flaws. The author (Brandon Mathis) highlighted some of those flaws in his post on the road to Octopress 3.

Recently, someone from the Public Health Foundation
contacted me because they found a blog post I had from back in 2005,
specifically Corporate/Government Parodies on the
Web. They asked if
I’d like to update the broken reference to mypyramid.gov (which no longer
exists) in favor of a new government nutrition website. Having gone back and
re-read the post for context, I initially thought I’d just ignore it for the
moment since I figured it had to be some automated webcrawler of sending emails
to DNS contacts for any hits referencing the old .gov URL. But they actually
sent me a followup email, so I thought I might go ahead and make some updates.

Yet another time of migration (blog-wise)…
TextDrive -> Joyent -> TextDrive 2 My web hosting has been a little up in the air recently (see Slashdot: Joyent Drops Lifetime Account Holders).
I paid a few hundred bucks several years back (2005) for “lifetime” web hosting at what I perceived to be a cool up and coming company (read: they claimed to be pushing to support a lot of the flashy new web tech that wasn’t well supported by most shared web hosting providers at the time).

So my hosting provider (was textdrive, now Joyent) is working on retiring all their old FreeBSD servers they were leasing. Yeah, it hadn’t occurred to me that you could lease a server like that. Anyway, they’re buying up fancy “Shared Accelerators” (8-core Opteron boxes with 4GB RAM/core from Sun running OpenSolaris) backed by SunFire x4500 Thumpers running ZFS.
I’d started off with this provider a couple years ago as part of a VC campaign (give us a large wad of cash, and we’ll give you an account for as long as we’re in business), and I’d upgraded at some point when they had a similar campaign that bumped up the specs on my hosting account and added their Connector service (group email, calendar, etc services with their own chunk of attached storage) and Strongspace service (large reliable online backup storage accessible via sftp/rsync over ssh/web over ssl).

There’s been a fair bit of hubbub about the social network/micro-blog services twitter and most recently pownce.
twitter is a bit of an interesting concept as it boils down to very short (less than 140 characters), text-only posts about what you’re up to. You can post updates in a variety of ways (web, email, im, sms message via cell, desktop client) and receive updates from your circle of twittery friends in a similar way (web, email, im, sms, desktop client, or rss feed).

I’ve gotten a bit farther in my updates for Malkier. I’ve fixed how I’d set up the databases. Basically I realized webmin had greater flexibility for creating databases than phpMyAdmin is currently set up to support. Things are nicely organized now in that respect. I’ve also upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, so I’ve gotten all those goodies and bugfixes now.
The main task left is to do some customization and update the style for my site.

Part way through switching over to K2. Looks like I need to fine tune the custom page themes I’ve previously created (for movies and header_graphics). They work at present, but the two column setup isn’t really formatted right under the new theme.
I also want to set up a new header graphic, probably tweak the color scheme, and maybe look into some other cool options/extensions (such as embedding a flickr feed in the sidebar).